Hacker News Reader

My main Linux box has quite a few hard drives in it from a large range of time. About 4 weeks ago the oldest of them all died: it is from 2007, so about 7 years old, which I think is pretty good for a consumer drive that's on 24/7. It was a Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200JB, 320GB. I replaced it with a 2TB drive.

[No lost data, I do daily backups.]

View on HN

I just replaced a WD Black 640 3 years into its life. Blacks have a 5 year so they RMA'd it and sent me a 750 in its place.

I do however have a Seagate drive laying around somewhere that has almost 10 years on it and it still functions flawlessly. But it is admittedly smaller given its age and that may contribute to lifespan. Either that or Seagate has slipped in the last decade.

Seagate apparently has slipped in the last 2-3 years. (Could this be related to the hard disk shortage due to flooding in Malaysia?)

Hard drive failures tend to happen more for drives that are power cycled a lot, and for drives that undergo big swings in temperature (even when the temps are all within the rated temp range).

I wonder what media people use to backup xTB NAS. Tapes ?

I back up my RAIDs to JBODs - so hard drive backups for hard drives, just fewer. I only use tape for vital and frequently backed up things - not entire drives, and generally not large.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com